This is cool but I played a much more complex game with a mind reading headset at Gates (Stanford) in 2007
Monkey MindPong
121–130 of 291 posts
Re: Monkey MindPong
#122I can't wait to see this technology be immediately used for nefarious purposes by dictatorships and power drunk governments.
No need to waterboard prisoners for information anymore when you can just suck data from their brains.
In most judicial systems, you cannot be compelled to testify against yourself. With this technology, I really worry that that right will slip away.
This feels like the precipice before dystopian hell, to me.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As they said in the video, the animal is doing the activity of it of it's own free will. Why don't they do it on humans then?
It's legally prohibited until a certain amount of animal testing has been performed. They're aiming to do the first human implants within a year.
> It's legally prohibited until a certain amount of animal testing has been performed.
Link?
Re: Monkey MindPong
#124Our brain interface tech is so primitive, but it holds incredible promise if we're able to solve it. Imagine being able to virtualize consciousness, back up memories, live forever... The problem is how invasive it is, and how little reward there is initially. We have to solve the chicken and egg problem, but unfortunately cracking open the skull and sticking electrodes into the brain is not something one typically wa…
Digitizing consciousness is a much harder problem, because we don't really understand how much of the brain works, the areas involved with conscious thought in particular, and the exact learning mechanisms the brain employs. The way we do deep learning these days is a very rough approximation of how the brain might work, and backpropagation is not really biologically plausible. So IMO, digitized consciousness is prob…
The thing i always think about with digital consciousness is that it would just be a clone that can’t distinguish itself from the OG consciousness that’s still resident in the brain.
The way this idea came to me was in a weird day dream thinking about the first experiment to attempt it... Patient lying on the table all wired up, a Dr. Frankenstein moment of ‘the upload’ followed by a screen witnessing the boot of the relocated consciousness. The doctor interacts with the persona, asking what it’s like and getting direct responses saying how amazing it is.
Meanwhile, amidst the commotion and celebration, you see the ’donor’ patient wake up in a reflection on the monitor and hear them faintly ask ‘did it work?’
Re: Monkey MindPong
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine the wonders it would do for interrogation /s
I assume your /s was meta-sarcastic. With a few decades (years?) of refinement, this technology absolutely has the potential to capture private thoughts. Sure, it may require an implant, but just like we all carry tracking beacons that have become indispensable to daily life today, in 20 years it may be “the done thing” to have an implant to control your home automation, etc. Or maybe the tech will improve to where i…
Sounds like the point in history where we should be practicing doublethink explicitly. Is this the evolutionary niche psychopaths are meant to fill?
Re: Monkey MindPong
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Maybe it will be able to extract speech directly from the brain, which is orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick. Check out https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1119-1 And yes it is definitely orders of magnitude harder than controlling a joystick
Imagine the wonders it would do for interrogation /s
Maybe you're onto something. Assuming your intent is to obtain information from a captured enemy at all costs, an implant like this is probably far more humane than waterboarding or actual torture.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#127This seems to be very similar to the early 2000s demos at Brown University/Cyberkinetics[1]. In 2008 they demonstrated it in humans[2] after lots of work getting FDA approval. The core difference here (from my non-expert reading) seem to be electrodes are along a thread rather than on a chip. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJPbpHoPWo for a video of the pong demo in humans. The motor cortex seems to have a clear…
Can somebody who is knowledgeable in this field of work explain how/if neuralink is better to the previous approaches and if its easier to "scale" this tech compared to previous works ?
Re: Monkey MindPong
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is nothing compared to what we were doing in lab several years ago. Neuralink is the least invasive of the invasive ways to conduct this research. I had to put animals down, because they would be defunct after trying to remove those bulkier devices. Neuralink is relatively humane, speaking as someone who has seen this technology in its infancy.
You're right. This monkey gets to earn banana smoothies all day. I'm sure it is quite happy. Much less happy are the animals we eat, those confined in zoos, and many of the pets people lock in tiny spaces.
Won't someone think of the monkeys!
Re: Monkey MindPong
#129The next step for Neuralink is write mode. No, not writing memories, but reprogramming motor function. If you can capture the signals of limb movement synapses for say, a paraplegic, you can read those signals and convert them into write signals in another part of the brain responsible for the actual motor function. Over time, that neuron pathway gets reinforced and could potentially teach a person how to walk again.…
I know there's a myriad of reasons why people lose the ability to walk, but are there any in which it's a matter of what sounds like memory degradation(i.e. you need to remind a particular set of neurons what they previously "knew")? Total non-expert here and legitimately curious.
Sometimes people with severe brain damage in the motor section can lose the ability to walk, yes, but that can also be solved with traditional physical therapy (brains are amazingly adaptive things, and can even repurpose other sections into motor function).
Butlike I said, traditional PT is a much less invasive solution to that, so I have no idea what GP is talking about.
Re: Monkey MindPong
#130The next step for Neuralink is write mode. No, not writing memories, but reprogramming motor function. If you can capture the signals of limb movement synapses for say, a paraplegic, you can read those signals and convert them into write signals in another part of the brain responsible for the actual motor function. Over time, that neuron pathway gets reinforced and could potentially teach a person how to walk again.…
>you can read those signals and convert them into write signals in another part of the brain responsible for the actual motor function.
The signals Neuralink is reading are from the "part of the brain responsible for the actual motor function". I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.
I think you may be confused on how the majority of paraplegic and NDG conditions work - it's not that the brain isn't producing the signals, it's that the signals aren't reaching the muscles they need to to create motor function - it's the link that's broken, for a variety of reasons.
Of course, the obvious corollary here is reading the signals and using electrodes implanted in the muscles to directly stimulate a contraction